Online film-booking site Gathr allows members to program screenings in local venues for films including music documentary Marley.Image courtesy Magnolia Pictures

Film-fan-turned-programmer Randy Berler books "limited release" indie films at a local Torrance, California AMC cineplex that otherwise would not play his neighborhood.Image courtesy Randy Berler

One year to the month after getting a rejection letter from the Sundance Film Festival, director Bill Sebastian stood shivering in the lobby of a Los Angeles theater debuting his movie on a chilly December night. "This is kind of nerve-wracking," Sebastian said in between hugs and handshakes with arriving guests. He may have been anxious about how people would react to QWERTY, his nerd-centric rom-com with Rocky overtones set in the world of championship Scrabble. But at least he didn't have to worry about losing his shirt over the cost of renting a screening room at Laemmle Theatres.

That's because Sebastian and his team booked the gig themselves using the Tugg.com pay-in-advance content-and-reservations system that brokers DIY screenings at venues ranging from indie theater houses to AMC multiplexes. Borrowing a page from Kickstarter, the site allows anyone with a functional credit card to organize screenings and if customers buy enough tickets to cover all the screening's expenses, the event gets confirmed. If advance ticket sales fall short, the screening gets canceled and nobody loses money.

"We wanted to set up some theatrical screenings without having to shell out a lot of money to 'four-wall' a theater or bang our head against the walls trying to get a real theatrical deal, which is almost impossible these days for a film like this," Sebastian explained.

Waiting in line for popcorn with his wife and daughter, moviegoer Barry Grey said he'd gotten an e-mail from QWERTY star Dana Pupkin, an old friend, pointing him to the Tugg site. Though he could have waited for a DVD version of the film, "I don't want to see them movies on the small screen if I can avoid it. Who wants to sit alone and watch a movie when you can be among people?"

Tugg co-founder Nicolas Gonda says the popularity of his site points to a reversal in the viewer migration from cineplex to living room that has dominated entertainment over the past few years. "When you're watching a film that you love with a captivated audience by your side – nothing compares to that."

The QWERTY one-nighter – and events like it – represent a hankering for customized cinema that might just re-shape the way movies are curated and consumed. Hollywood's traditional food chain still dictates when, where and how most people see films on a big screen, but that top-down approach now bumps up against an emerging have-it-your-way cinema phenomenon that owes much of its vigor to the same digitally powered economies of scale that transformed music distribution: Freed from the need to manufacture and move around bulky physical objects, managing movie content is a hell of a lot cheaper than it used to be.

Empowered by new tech tools, self-appointed tastemakers can now stage everything from theme nights to esoteric documentaries with one goal in mind: suck people out of their houses and into dark rooms where they can sit with like-minded film fans and experience a big picture on a giant screen.

Indie Film Fan Books His Own Screenings
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Living in a Southern California beach town, indie film fan Randy Berler had to drive an hour into Los Angeles to see the kind of arthouse movies he craved. Sick of traffic and hopeful that there were other cinephiles like him in his neighborhood region, the retired city planner took matters into his own hands last spring, contacted Tugg and became a DIY movie programmer booking films at the local AMC cineplex.

Since forming South Bay Film Society in June, he's relied on a 500-person e-mail list to sell out 200-seat screenings of movies, including Norwegian crime thriller Headhunters and recession-themed documentary The Queen of Versailles (also named one of Wired.com's Best Films You Didn't See in 2012). He works closely with venue managers, who provide him with a wireless microphone so he can moderate post-screening discussion groups.

"Essentially I have created a community theater," Berler told Wired by e-mail. "At these one-night screenings, people watch intelligent films, see their friends and make new friends. They could not get that type of experience sitting home and watching a DVD."

Gathr Films founder Scott Glosserman, whose site similarly organizes crowd-demand screenings for music documentaries like Marley, breaks down the numbers for film versus digital screenings: "If Christopher Nolan wants to screen a 70mm print of The Dark Knight Rises at an Imax theater, the cost of producing canisters of 70mm film and shipping them to an Imax theater will run around $40,000," he told Wired by phone. "Putting that same movie onto an encrypted digital cinema package, a DCP – which is essentially a glorified hard drive that fits in the palm of your hand – costs roughly $150. The costs of delivery have absolutely bottomed out."

Studios did the math earlier this decade and encouraged movie theaters to invest in digital projectors. About 14,400 North American venues out of a total 30,000 theaters now feature digital capabilities, according to National Association of Theater Owners spokesman Patrick Corcoran.

As Tugg CEO Gonda sees it, the convergence of low-cost movie files, streamlined delivery and digitally upgraded venues set the table for a model that turns fans into programmers. Since launching in February, the Austin, Texas-based service has enabled DIY promoters to pick from a library of more than 800 movie titles ranging from old Alfred Hitchcock movies and obscure documentaries to cult favorites like RoboCop, which inspired a flurry of fan-orchestrated 25th-anniversary screenings over the summer.

"The ability to marry crowdsourcing capability with theatrical distribution is an extremely modern opportunity that only arose in the last 18 to 24 months as theaters transitioned from film projectors to digital projectors," said Gonda.

The if-you-book-it-they-will-come model stands to benefit theater owners as well, since they can pack the house on off nights with true believers frothing at the mouth to watch super-specialized niche films. For example, Texas-area gamers thronged to a one-night screening of Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters documentary, then stuck around to play a super-size version when organizers connected the game system to the projector.

The makers of sci-fi Nazi satire Iron Sky similarly made the most of its cult following: The Finnish filmmakers circumvented traditional distribution channels by mobilizing fans who'd already helped fund the production. The result: 70 Tugg-powered screenings took place in 56 North American cities over the summer.

Image courtesy Craig Downing

Screw the Cineplex
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Even Hollywood is getting in on the "give moviegoers more options" theme, offering up old movies that have been remastered or newly converted to 3-D. The pumped-up theatrical releases typically function to hype a new DVD package, but who's complaining: Top Gun in 3-D IMAX? Yep!

And the endless array of film formats expands this month with the recent release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. The film will play in selected theaters in the controversial new 48-frames-per-second HFR format preferred by director Peter Jackson. But audiences can also choose a cheaper ticket and see the picture at the conventional 24 fps frame rate.

"What we want to do for the first Hobbit movie is to make sure people have a choice," Jackson told Wired in a phone interview. "We don't want to give audiences the feeling that we're ramming this down their throat."

And customized cinema extends beyond the film content itself to the very venues where movies are shown. Microcinema group Couch Fest Films thinks outside the cineplex box by bringing together tiny audiences in castles, boats, living rooms and other makeshift "theaters" throughout the world. The informal settings are meant to encourage schmoozing, said festival founder Craig Downing. "Couch Fest is a community-building event disguised as a film festival. Every screening always has a five-minute intermission. We hope this encourages the audience to chitchat about the experience they just shared."

This year's Couch Fest, which took place earlier this month, featured short-film screenings hosted in 17 countries, including Nepal and Lithuania. In place of passive audiences that wait and see what shows up at the neighborhood theater, Downing envisions a future cinema peopled by gregarious go-getters. "There's so many options now," he said. "People can choose to host an entire shorts film festival in their house or sign up for a single-day license fee and screen on a public wall."

If Tugg, Couch Fest and other champions of this new, customized approach to cinema have it right, seeing movies in a theater is a group ritual whose time has come, and gone, and come back again. Only this time around, you can have it your way. With popcorn. Easy on the butter.

Leading Question
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If you had the bandwidth to organize a screening of your favorite movie, which film would that be? And if you could pick any place in the world to watch a movie, where would it be? Fire away in the comments section below.